First Book Signing on November 20, 2012

I hope to have some more pictures from the actual book-signing event to put up here soon. The only downside to being the author at a book-signing is that you really don't get to take any pictures on your own camera, so I need to get pictures from others who were at the signing.

In the weeks before the signing, we created posters and flyers and sent out mailings inviting everyone we know to the event. The Kane County Chronicle ran a story about the upcoming book-signing a few days before the event. The staff at B&N were very impressed, saying over and over again that most authors are not willing to do the leg-work of advertising or marketing the event. I'm not sure what B&N did to advertise the event, but we had flyers up in local coffee shops and many of the high schools in the area.

On the day of the event we got to Barnes and Noble at about 5:00pm, and finished up around 7:30pm. We had two huge posters set up, as well as a display where Angelina had posted a lot of her artwork leading up to the final painting for the cover.

I was kept busy talking to people and signing books for about 2 hours straight. I barely sat down, which was great because it meant we had a lot of people there. I had several people asking me questions about my book throughout the night, and one customer came in simply because she had seen the article in the paper and wanted to know how to pronounce "Aom-igh!" (it's AY-oh-MY, in case you're wondering as well). Around 7:15pm I got a chance to read the prologue of my book out loud to a group of our clients, which was probably the most fun part of the evening.

We had a sizable crowd the entire time, and sold 26 books. The staff at B&N indicated that we did pretty well for this being our first book signing and me being a virtual no-name. At the end of the night Barnes and Noble had me sign 6 of the leftover copies and they put them on display at the center customer service desk to sell.

It was just really fun to have the opportunity to sell my book inside one of the largest brick and mortar bookstore chains in the country. It was also a great learning experience. We look forward to future events!